Children's Poetry Competition 2012 - Sports Poems

It's that time of year again, so prepare to get on your marks, get set and go with this year's sports poem competition. This time, the challenge is to write a poem about any sport, but you can get creative with this as it doesn't have to be anything traditional - we'll take any sort of activity if you count it as a sport!

Please Note The 2012 poetry competition is now closed, so you can't submit new entries, but you can enjoy reading the winning poems, the other entries or you can write an sports poem, just for fun.

Taking part in the competition

Make sure you follow these simple rules when you submit your work. Don’t worry, there aren’t very many.

You must create a poem about a sport (but we’ll be quite lenient and will let you write about almost anything if you count it as a sport)

You must be aged 16 or under at the time of writing the poem

The poem you submit must be your own, original piece of work

A maximum of three poems per person may be submitted

The poem can take any form or style, but make sure you keep it under 20 lines

The competition can be entered by children anywhere in the world

The deadline for the submission of entries is 31st October 2012.

What sports can I write about?

As long as you pick something that you consider to be a sport, you can write about nearly any activity. From the traditional cricket and rugby to Olympic classics such as athletics and swimming, or even telly watching – we’ll accept almost anything!

Judging and Prizes

This year the competition is taking on a slightly different format, and instead of awarding prizes by age group, poems will be judged together from all those submitted. We will of course take into account your age when we do this, but because we’ve decided that sometimes there are just too many brilliant poets in one age group, we thought that this would be the best way to make sure the awards go to the very best poems.

All poems will be reviewed by an independent judge and the winners will be announced in mid November 2012. The top poem will receive the Gold award and a £50 prize. The Silver award will be £30 and the winner of the Bronze award will receive £20.

Sending in your poems

If you'd like to enter the competition, please email Patrick at
and we’ll aim to put it up on our site so that it can be shared with our other readers. Please rememnber to include the following things:

The poem
Send us your entry either as an attachment or in the main body of the email.

Your name, age and where you live
Please give us your full name (first and last names) and your age at the time of writing the poem. You don't need to give us your full address, just the town, city or country where you live will do. When we publish your poem on our website, we'll only put your first name, your age and where you live e.g. written by Amy, aged 8 from Amersham.

Why you wrote the poem
We'd love to hear what inspired you to write your poem and why you chose the sport you did. If it's a particularly unusual sport that you've decided to feature, let us know why you consider that activity to be a sport. Also tell us why you enjoyed writing the poem (or perhaps you were made to write it at school by a very cruel teacher and hated every minute of it!).

We’ll try our best to put as many poems as possible up on the website. Some of the previous entries in our competitions have gone on to be published and even set to music and performed by Canada’s fantastic youth choir, Arcady.